Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Binoy Kampmark
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Defiling statues of Jesus: Israel’s counterfeit outrage at cultural vandalism
They have kept their strategy of cultural and institutional vandalism generously broad in recent campaigns against their adversaries. It therefore came as something of a surprise that much febrile fuss was made about this month’s antics of an IDF soldier photographed attacking a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon on…
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Troubled relations: Pope Leo XIV and President Donald Trump
Depending on which historical sources you care to consult, the Pope has been a figure of obloquy, ridicule and abomination. This mediator between the terrestrial and the divine was always set for the battering. Martin Luther’s violent Protestant split from the body of the Catholic Church was merely one aspect…
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Confused closures and opaque openings: Continuing dramas in the Hormuz Strait
Reading messages from President Donald J. Trump is an exercise in taunting masochism. It is one inflicted on commentators and the press corps the world over, and they are not better for it. The latest – and here, the latest will become distant and dated shortly – is that the…
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Ceasefire exemptions and quarries of death: Israel’s war on Lebanon
In the Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defines peace as a period of cheating between two periods of fighting. The Israeli version of a ceasefire might be defined as a moment of war deceptively halted to enable conflict to continue. War as cosplay and camouflage. Under such fragile conditions, military objectives…
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Trump, Hegseth and the Language of War Crimes
He’s out of ideas, a mind running on empty. Increasingly, he is also short of reason, zapped by geopolitical addling and meddling. Now that US President Donald J. Trump has reached an uneasy understanding with Teheran that a two-week ceasefire should apply to the warring parties (Israel, as usual, has…
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Executing with prejudice: Israel’s death penalty law
It was celebrated with ghoulish delight. On March 30, the Israeli Knesset passed the Penal Bill (Amendment – Death Penalty for Terrorists), an instrument expanding the use of the death penalty for offences of a terrorist nature. The death penalty had previously existed in Israeli law for war crimes but…
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Closing air spaces and cracking alliances: Trump’s growing problem with allies
With the Iran War groaning along, the Trump administration is getting increasingly indignant. Plumes of childish anger can be seen coming out of the White House and Pentagon. Having joined an illegal, joint enterprise with Israel in attacking Iran, allies are proving increasingly unwilling to play along. That unwillingness gurgled…
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The Iran War: A Great Carbon Emitter
Truth may well be the first casualty of war, but death, injury and environmental degradation are bound to be keeping up in the hit lists. Attacks on gas fields, oil refineries and petrochemical plants will always leave an impression once the conflict concludes. In the case of carbon emissions, the…
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Auguries of failure: Israel invades Lebanon, yet again
When will Israel realise that invading Lebanon with paralytic compulsion can never be the solution to its security ills? Having destroyed Gaza with existential, illegal fury, the Israeli Defense Forces have commenced operations in Lebanon with a similar, devastating imprint. Doltishly assuming that the Lebanon front would stay quiet as…
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More parleying nonsense: Trump, Iran and promised negotiations
It’s almost not worth considering, but precisely because it comes from the White House, the mad manoeuvrings and silly airings of the US President must be taken seriously. But only to a point. Over the last week, a series of events have taken place demonstrating the growing alarm within the…
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Tremors in MAGA: Joe Kent, the Iran war and the antisemitism smear
Joe Kent, the now former US Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, always seemed a bit off, especially to liberals. As a combat veteran of MAGA pedigree, he found favour with President Donald J. Trump, who rewarded him for his conspiracy blustering in a manner befitting other nominees baptised in…
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No naval escort for Trump: US allies and the Strait of Hormuz
With each dragged out day, President Donald Trump begins resembling a mad emperor who has not only taken leave of his senses but leave of everything else. Having hitched his wagon to the Israeli program of chaos and destabilisation in the Middle East, he is stuck in a war he…
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Opportunistic asylum: How Australia exploited the Iranian women’s football team
When it comes to asylum seekers, the Australian political machine has prided itself on using cruelty and a purposely obtuse understanding of international law. Bolted sovereignty has been elevated over rights and humanitarianism, while political interests have abominated the dark, hungering hordes heading to the island continent on unseaworthy boats. …
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Blocking fertilisers: The Hormuz Strait and agricultural shock
The closure of virtually all commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz occasioned by the Iran War is not merely a matter of oil and gas, the usual prized duo that feature in the nervous chatter of global markets. There are other less conspicuous products that have also been snared…
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Costly and depleting: The growing problems of Operation Epic Fury
The big drain on military resources has begun. A war apparently already won (and not), against an adversary supposedly without means to fight back, its air force and navy destroyed, its missile capabilities blunted, is now drawing the clumsy colossus of American power into the Middle East with embarrassing effect. …
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Existential attrition: Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz
“The geopolitical genie is out of the bottle: by capitalizing on geography to disrupt global trade, countries can strengthen their strategic position at relatively low cost.” Alex Mills, The Atlantic Council, March 12, 2026 With each day of glorified actions against Iran, with each cloudy press session claiming supreme success…
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Middle power nonsense: Australia, Canada and capitulating to the Iran War
In his January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave the impression of a banker turned soothsayer, a Daniel coming to judgment. Here was a born-again man of international relations who would rally the middle powers (from the middle) and try to assert…
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Starmer’s self-defence fudge: The UK’s growing involvement in the Iran War
Wars can distract, and for leaders in political purgatory, they can be particularly useful. It remains to be seen whether the UK’s increasing involvement in the illegal war being waged on Iran by Israel and the United States will serve that purpose. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, the great saviour…
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Loony bin rationales: The continuing war on Iran
Villainous lunacy is abundant these days as the bombing of Iran by Israel and the United States continues. The rationale for this illegal pre-emptive war that not only lacks legitimacy but should land its perpetrators in the docks of the International Criminal Court, continues to get increasingly muddled. With US…
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Going native in the Trump jungle: How it became legal to attack Iran
The allies of the United States have gone native, feral even, in the jungle of international relations planted by President Donald J. Trump. While we keep hearing about how awful Russia’s war against Ukraine is, with its shattering of international law and its dismissiveness of the provisions of the United…
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Roguish justifications: The apologists for the attack on Iran
February 28, 2026. Another attack, another breach of the United Nations Charter. A gross violation of international law. As usual, a violation celebrated as ethical, necessary, and high-minded in principle by the powerful who dictate such terms. Not squalid, dangerous, destabilising. Not, apparently, following the same pattern as before: interventions…
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Mendacious rationales: The lies behind Operation Lion’s Roar
Many in the United States would scarcely identify the difference between Iran and Iraq, both countries based on ancient civilisations so chronologically distant as to be fiction. If not Marvel, it’s not marvellous. But another fiction came into play towards the end of February as the United States and Israel…
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Biblical writ and Christian Zionism: Mike Huckabee, Tucker Carlson and Israel
It was good of Mike Huckabee, US ambassador to Israel, to come clean with the witchery and superstition that marks the Bible. When a text advocating genocide, ethnic cleansing and dubious real estate advice in the name of a vengeful Sky God becomes foreign policy and the sentiment of an…
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Punishing language: Queensland’s Antisemitism Bill
In a feat of enterprising delusion and sinister suppression, Australia’s second largest state has decided to deal with what it regards as an antisemitic problem. After last December’s attacks on Sydney’s Bondi Beach by two gunmen on attendees of a Hanukkah event that left 15 people dead, it has become…